Oh, how the mighty have fallen. A recent short New Yorker review of Bob Dylan's latest album suggests that listeners who try to identify all the songwriter's citations may even find themselves asking in disbelief: “is that line borrowed from Sir Walter Scott?” (Ben Greenman, “Pop Notes: Roll On, Bob,” New Yorker, 10 September 2012, 14). Ann Rigney's new book poses an even more interesting question for literary and cultural historians: how is it that the most famous and popular author of his generation, and perhaps of the entire nineteenth century, has become reduced—at least for the general public—to little more than a footnote?
Drawing on the methods and resources of literary criticism as well as the rapidly expanding field of “memory studies,” which the author introduces effectively at the beginning of her book, Rigney begins by looking for answers in Scott's novels themselves. Focusing primarily on Waverley (1814), The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), Rob Roy (1817), and Ivanhoe (1820), arguably Scott's most important fictions and certainly some of his best sellers, Rigney uses the first half of Afterlives to demonstrate the remarkable impact of Scott's prodigious talent both at home and abroad. Shortly after the 1814 publication of Waverley, Rigney argues, Scott's fictions “seem to have acquired the status of collective texts and [were] treated as common property,” a process of cultural osmosis abetted by Scott's dogged insistence on pseudoanonymity as well as by his repeated use of already available folk stories and tropes (63). His novels' subsequent re-mediations into plays, pageants, and other popular cultural performances extended the sense that Scott was public property as well as a productively hybrid national asset. Rigney's close readings of the major novels, revelatory on their own, combine with the statistics she cites (during the nineteenth century, for example, Scott's books inspired at least ninety operas, over four thousand theatrical productions, and countless illustrations and portraits) to impress upon readers the truly unprecedented scale of Scott's success over the course of what Rigney aptly calls “the long Scott century” (13) from 1814 to 1932.
Yet those same novels also contain within themselves the seeds of their own forgetting. Through his historical romances, Rigney argues, Scott encouraged and taught readers to view the past as akin to Wittgenstein's ladder: something to be climbed up and then thrown away when no longer needed. In the process, Afterlives demonstrates, Scott taught his readers that his own fictions could be treated similarly. Even as the terrific energy of the Waverley novels was inspiring their rapid cultural uptake (Rigney does a particularly fine job exploring how Ivanhoe's openly unsatisfactory ending, which famously pairs Ivanhoe with the socially acceptable but bland Rowena rather than the unacceptable—because Jewish—but passionate Rebecca, helped inspire countless new versions for the stage), it was also being dissipated by the ease with which Scott's ambivalent fictions lent themselves to cooptation by contradictory causes. Thus, Rigney shows that Mark Twain was exaggerating but not entirely wrong when he famously blamed the American Civil War on Scott's pernicious influence: the South really did (mis)identify itself with Scott's chivalric heroes, and the Ku Klux Klan infamously adopted the fiery cross used by Scott's clansmen for glen-to-glen communication in The Lady of the Lake.
The later chapters of Afterlives take up the story of the gradual decline of Scott's reputation following his death in 1832. The public mourning that occurred on that occasion was remarkable even by Victorian standards, sweeping Europe and North America as well as Britain. Soon, however, remembering Scott became as much about displaying national pride or literary taste as about actually reading the Waverley novels. Chapter 5, which focuses on the legacy of Scott's pseudobaronial mansion, Abbotsford, demonstrates not only how it influenced the construction of countless other gentlemanly estates but also how its museum-like qualities led to the localization, and even the sequestration, of the past. Places like Abbotsford quickly became “memory sites” (18) where the past could be both conserved and simultaneously quarantined from the present. The planning and construction of Edinburgh's Scott Monument had a similar effect: the iconic, larger-than-life Gothic spire in Edinburgh's New Town may have been intended to celebrate Scott's life and achievements, but it nevertheless both dwarfs the marble statue of the author of Waverley that shelters beneath it and sticks out like a soot-blackened, petrified thumb in the busy downtown. By the time of the centenary celebrations of Scott's birth and death (in 1871 and 1932, respectively), it had become increasingly clear, at least to Rigney's perspicuous retrospective gaze, that Scott was transitioning from national icon to nostalgic, even faintly embarrassing, figurehead. From “the Great Unknown,” he was well on his way to becoming “the Great Unread” (211).
And what of Scott's prospects today? In a brief epilogue, Rigney readily admits that, for a variety of reasons, Scott seems unlikely ever again to share the fame now enjoyed by his lesser-known contemporary Jane Austen (of whose books, it should be noted, Scott had the good sense to write one of the first favorable reviews). But Rigney observes that, from a critical and academic perspective, Scott's reputation has been largely rehabilitated, both as a key figure in the history of the novel and as a profoundly perceptive thinker regarding modernity as well as historicity. If the custodianship of Scott's memory has passed into the hands of academics who largely write for each other, then at least he is beginning to appear regularly on college literature syllabi. Teaching, Rigney reminds us, is a “counter-amnesiac force and an active intervention in the cultural memory” (226). So too, of course, is writing. Rigney's lucid, intelligent, well-researched book deserves the widest possible audience, not only for what it tells us about the fate of Scott's fictions and influence, but also for what it teaches us about the intricate dance of cultural remembering and forgetting.
